Required skimming: digital longreads

Engrossing stories on any platform

This month, CJR presents “Required Skimming,” a daily miniguide to our staffers’ beats and obsessions. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments.

—The Atavist: Featuring original e-singles that are “between magazine-article and book length,” The Atavist releases one compelling longform story a month. Storytellers can also sign up to use its platform, Creatavist, to tell their own multimedia tales.

—Big Round Table: A new initiative by Columbia Journalism School professor Michael Shapiro, BRT accepts longform submissions which are then sent to a small group of readers. The ones that the group likes most are then edited and posted on the site, which currently accepts donations rather than selling the works. Ninety percent of donations go to the author.

—Byliner: “Think of us as dim sum for hungry minds,” is how longform subscription service Byliner describes itself. For $9.99 a month, readers get access the service’s archive of ebooks, anthologies, and articles, searchable by the amount of reading time a person has.

—Longform.org: This aggregation site recommends reads, both new and old, from around the Web. Longform.org also has an iPad app and a podcast produced with The Atavist.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.

Don't Miss

In June 2003, the San Francisco company Linden Labs launched a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game called Second Life. It quickly grew to over a million users, and has become a touchstone for the potential social adoption...